"It's hard not to write about the war," John Vanderslice said, acknowledging the anti-war themes that crop up in several songs on his radiant new CD, Pixel Revolt. Far better known for his meticulously crafted and painstakingly produced pop songs and his dogged devotion to analog recording techniques (institutionalized in his Tiny Telephone studio in San Francisco's Mission District) than his political opinions, Vanderslice couldn't suppress his outrage over the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

"I have enormous sympathies with people who have been scammed into joining the military and who are put in a horrendous, horrible position for some unknowable geopolitical reason," the singer, songwriter and guitarist explained last week in phone call from his tour van on the road between Boston and Washington, D.C. He and his band perform Saturday, Nov. 5, at The Independent in San Francisco.

Vanderslice doesn't mince words in conversation. "I really hate George Bush. Every day it's like a bomb ticking in my skull." But, at least since penning "Bill Gates Must Die" (from the perspective of an Internet porn addict) for his first solo album, he is generally more judicious in his songwriting, perhaps reluctantly so. An avid fan of rap, from commercial product like Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP to such underground artists as Murs, he envies the latitude hip-hop artists enjoy in their lyrics. "The one thing that I really resent rappers for is that they get to have these assassination fantasies," he said. "They can use the most graphic imagery and get away with it. If I could do it I would."

But Vanderslice -- who has recorded and released five CDs under his own name since he debuted with Mass Suicide Occult Figurines in 2000 (also the year his former group, MK Ultra, issued its final album) -- opts for more oblique and suggestive imagery in his own songs. In Pixel Revolt's "Plymouth Rock," for instance, he creates a damning vignette of military duty from the perspective of a soldier who is quite possibly mortally wounded during a "moonless night" raid on the heavily armored Iraqi nuclear facility at Tuwaitha: "When we jumped off the deck / white bullets tore right through my neck ... sew me up again / get me out of here," he sings, coming to question the rationale behind his assignment, "I lost the reason / I lost the reason I'm here."

"I do think that it's hard to write a protest song or an anti-war song," Vanderslice said, "and part of the reason is that it's kind of like, 'duh!' There's nowhere to go from there, so I thought I'd take a different angle." Musically, "Plymouth Rock" gains power from its deftly molded dreamscape of acoustic, electric and Ebowed guitars, analog synthesizers and electric piano, drums and manipulated effects. Like most of Pixel Revolt, the sonic elements -- along with Vanderslice's vulnerable vocals -- are compulsively positioned in a 3-D space that draws the listener in.

The effect, replicated all over Pixel Revolt with different combinations of instruments, is deliberate, explained the Florida-born and East Coast-raised musician. "I wanted to foreshorten the distance between me and the listener, both from the lyrical point of view and also sonically," he said. "There are less distressed sounds and distortion and off-putting dissonance. It's more patient. [Multi-instrumentalist and longtime musical collaborator] Scott Solter has everything to do with that. He laid out the case right at the beginning. He wanted to make a more pretty record, and he wanted me to sing differently -- use more of the falsetto and softer tone of the top register of my voice. And I went with it 100 percent."

A zealous film buff, Vanderslice appreciates the collaborative process that belies the more glamorized auteur theory of pop culture creativity. He readily cites the pivotal roles played by Solter, New York improvising cellist/string arranger Erik Friedlander and a host of other musicians in the making of Pixel Revolt. "I'm very, very lucky to have the people around me that I have," he said. "I try to note that as much as I can, because in many ways the name on the record should be John Vanderslice and ... and ... and ... and ... ."

For assistance with song titles, Vanderslice turned to Silver Jews honcho David Berman -- "a huge figure in my mind for a long time." (Vanderslice is even calling this his "I've been living in a k-hole" U.S. Fall Tour, in homage to the opening track of the new Silver Jews CD.) And unlike the stereotypical solo singer-songwriter, who you might imagine holing up in a garret to scrawl his confessions in total privacy, this bard relied on his friend John Darnielle, better known as the Mountain Goats, to edit and tweak his lyrics. "John was involved from the very, very beginning," Vanderslice noted.

The new songs range in subject matter from conspiracy theories around Sept. 11 ("an hour went by without a fighter in the sky / you said there's a reason why / so tell me now, I must confess / I'm not sick enough to guess" -- "Exodus Damage"), the nuclear threat ("Radiant with Terror," adapted from the Robert Lowell poem "Fall 1961") and star-struck stalkers ("Peacocks in the Video Rain") to a murder mystery ("Continuation") and an accidentally freed pet bunny ("Angela"). Characters with complex motive move through fragmented narratives, evocatively framed in poetic language. Vandersclice credits Darnielle with helping him refine his often metaphorical lyrics.

"I would write a first version of a song and send it to him. It was all e-mail, but sometimes, when I was really far off base he would call me, sometimes within 20 minutes. Sometimes he would say, 'Change this one word,' and sometimes he would say, 'You need to explode this narrative and bring it outside of its location or its intent or its emotional range.' He's my guy. He's my psychiatric nurse. And I am his. We're extremely linked up. This is a tough gig. It can be a kind of unnatural life, and if you have even the slightest mental instability, it can exacerbate it -- you need a support network of people who are doing it."

Asked to single out one album from his childhood that inspired him to pursue this aberrant line of work, Vanderslice named the original-cast recording of Hair. "It was a really big thing for me when I was very young," he explained. "It had humor, drama, playfulness, darkness, psychedelic intensity with elements of Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building pop and classic vaudevillian songwriting." The Who, the Kinks, Pink Floyd and David Bowie also populate Vanderslice's classic-rock pantheon, and such contemporaries as David Bejar (Destroyer) and Radiohead fuel his record-making passion.

In 1997, he opened up Tiny Telephone, which quickly gained notoriety for its once-upon-a-time, state-of-the-art analog equipment. Although such indie stars as Spoon, Deerhoof, Jolie Holland and many others have flocked to the facility, Vanderslice said, "I started it for one reason only, and that's to have enough cash flow to record my own records in the way I had imagined I would need to. I really wanted to have the freedom to orchestrate stuff inside the studio."

Seeking to emulate his idols, who used the studio as an integral part of the creative process, Vanderslice continued: "I am definitely pretty hard-core stridently analog. I started out with Pro Tools and a tape machine in my studio, and I was kind of convinced that it was the best of both worlds. There's definitely a financial incentive for me to have both formats, but after two years of hearing the difference in sound quality, I took my Makita drill and I just backed that Pro Tools rig right out. It's not like I'm depriving the world of anything. Digital recording is available everywhere. Tiny Telephone is more useful if we just specialize in something else."

Vanderslice's commitment to the warmth and purity of analog sound prompted him to stockpile $8,000 worth of recording tape in a closet in his apartment when it looked like no one would be making it anymore. He also convinced his label, Barsuk, to press 500 numbered, double-gatefold LP versions of Pixel Revolt on 180-gram vinyl. "They are totally wonderful, but I really had to fight them on doing a vinyl pressing," he said. "They thought I was committing suicide. It sold out in six days."

Vanderslice is old school about his work ethic as well. The former Chez Panisse bartender ("It wasn't just a restaurant, it existed on so many different levels, and it had everything to do with how and why I started the studio") puts out an album a year, while major-label musicians commonly celebrate several birthdays between releases. "David Bowie averaged more than a record a year in the '70s and did stadium tours and collaborations," he explained. "It was de rigueur. This is my full-time job. It's all I do and all I think about -- this and NBA basketball. I just don't see any reason why there has to be three years between records."

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On his way to the Hear & Now, Oakland native Derk Richardson nearly finished his Ph.D. in history, wrote a guidebook to Thailand, jerked sodas at Ozzie's in Berkeley and taught scuba for underwater scientific research.

He has written about music since 1978 and is managing editor at Acoustic Guitar magazine and host of "The Hear & Now," a free-form music show (every Thursday, 10 pm-midnight) on KPFA 94.1 FM.